German-American Discourse on Politics and Culture

September 18, 2017

I'm making my way through the 900 pages of Christopher Isherwood's Diaries - and that's just the first of three volumes. Isherwood arrived in New York City in 1939 with his friend W.H.Auden, but then made a beeline to Hollywood - which he took to like a duck to water. Isherwood was something of a social butterfly, and knew virtually all of the great Hollywood actors, screenwriters, directors and producers. Isherwood possessed an effortless power of description and could capture the essence of an individual by recounting a gesture or a snippet of conversation. His diary contains so many vivid portraits of famous people in the Hollywood of the 1940s, and wonderful stories of drinking with Charlie Chaplin, flirting with Greta Garbo, and so many other encounters.

My real interest in the Diaries was to read about Isherwood's interaction with the German exile community in southern California. Isherwood was a close friend of the Austrian writer Bertold Viertel and the two collaborated on several projects. Viertel's wife - Salka Viertel - organized a Salon for European artists and intellectuals in and around Hollywood, and Isherwood quickly became a fixture there (see my review of Salka Viertel's memoir The Kindness of Strangers). Of course, Thomas Mann and his family were often present at Salka Viertel's brunches and dinner parties, and Isherwood became friends with Klaus and Erika Mann. Here is his description of Thomas Mann from July 1940:

"At lunch were Thomas and Frau Mann. [...]He looks wonderfully young for his age - perhaps because, as a boy, he was elderly and staid. With careful, deliberate gestures, he chooses a cigar, examines a cognac bottle, opens a furniture catalogue - giving each object his full, serious attention. Yet he isn't in the least pompous. He has great natural dignity. He is a true scholar a gentlemanly householder, a gracefully ironic pillar of society - solid right through. He would be magnificent at his own trial. Indeed, he has been making the speech for the defence ever since he left Germany."

Shortly after this, Mann would begin his very vocal defense of western liberal democracy in his Deutsche Hörer! ("Listen, Germany!") radio broadcasts to Nazi Germany.

Later, Isherwood had some unpleasant interactions with Brecht, who tried to hound him into translating his play Der kaukasische Kreidekreis: ("He (Brecht) is utterly ruthless, opportunistic and selfish. I don't believe he'd waste five moments on anyone who wasn't in a position to do him a favor.") Once again, in two sentences, Isherwood captures the essence.

September 10, 2017

She was supposed to be the "moderate" face of the right-wing nationalist AfD: a PhD management consultant who is in a lesbian relationship. She comes across in her stump speech and debates as a mainstream conservative, more concerned about the role of EZB (European Central Bank) than in deporting immigrants. As the public face of her party, Alice Weidel could appeal to right-wing CDU voters who are not happy with some of Angela Merkel's policies:

Weidel's poise and her knack for sidestepping the racist and xenophobic remarks by its leading politicians has led her critics to believe that her main role is to lure voters otherwise put off by rhetoric that smacks of the country's Nazi past. "I have no use for nationalistic ranting," Weidel told the Südwest Presse in 2016. In subsequent interviews she has described the AfD's tendency toward far-right sentiments as problematic and a distraction from important discussions. Instead of ranting about the refugee crisis or Islamist terrorists, Weidel opts for a calm tone. Photos of refugee suffering "broke her heart," she said on a national talk show in 2016 - but pointed out that Germany couldn't help everyone.

But this "moderate" image of Alice Weidel has been shaken by the discovery of a 2013 email, sent by "Alice Weidel" to a small group of friends:

"Lille" was Alice Weidel's nickname at the time. Here is my translation:

(The reason why we are overrun by culturally foreign people such as Arabs, Sinti and Roma is the systematic destruction of civil society as a possible counterweight from the enemies of the constitution by whom we are governed. These pigs are nothing more than marionettes of the WWII Allied victors whose job is to suppress the German Volk through mini-civil wars in our urban centers induced by this foreign infiltration. Just follow this link concerning Germany's "sovereignty". The fact that Germany is not at all sovereign can be seen in the repulsive fatalism of our policies - such as expropriation due to the bailout of the euro, corrupt judiciary (the German constitutional court).... More on this later. )

Weidel has attempted to block publication of this email, claiming that it is Fake News.

Under normal circumstances, a blatantly racist email such as this would turn voters away from the AfD and torpedo Weidel's chances of taking a seat in the Bundestag. But, as we saw with the candidacy of Donald Trump - whose poll numbers soared with every racist or sexist comment he made -, there is a sizable contingent of voters who are thrilled by such incendiary statements. My guess is that the AfD's support will surge in the final days leading up to the national election.

September 04, 2017

If anyone thought that Martin Schulz could revive his flailing campaign with a strong debate performance, they were sorely disappointed by last evening's "TV-Duell". Schulz blew his chance to make a case for change by essentially agreeing with the chancellor on many issues. Of course, his problem was that his own party as coalition partner was equally responsible for many of the policies he was attempting to criticize. In the end, as Gabor Steingart noted this morning, his performance came across as more of a "job interview" for a government post:

On the other hand, after having sat through three televised debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, last night's snooze fest featuring two respectful, competent politicians was not entirely unwelcome.

What really bothered me about Schulz was his appalling ignorance of foreign policy. Okay, he scored some points with his tough stance against Erdogan in Turkey. But he was so intent on trashing Donald Trump that when asked about the North Korea's nuclear threat he said he would engage with Mexico and Canada. There are only three nations that have any influence on the crisis on the Korean peninsula: Russia, China and the US. With a weakened European Union, Germany's only chance to have any influence in the world is through its alliance with the United States. In his campaign stump speech, Schulz attempts to score populist points by calling for the removal of American nuclear weapons from German soil, even as Putin is building up his nuclear arsenal in Kaliningrad.

Apropos Russia, it was the chancellor who had the best jab of the evening - sealing her debate victory:

Was this something he just dreamed up on his own, or overheard in a Munich beer hall? No, Hitler was basing his treatise on the most advanced "scientific research" coming out of the United States. The field of "eugenics" originated in Great Britain, but it was the Americans who latched on to the theory and began to develop social and medical (forced sterilization) programs based on the junk science. American eugenics grew out of the Social Darwinist ("survival of the fittest") misinterpretation of evolution popular in the late 19th century and a crude interpretation of genetics which began to emerge early 20th century America. Much of the eugenics "research" and policy recommendations came out of America's great universities, and at the forefront was the country's oldest and most prestigious institution: Harvard University. This is personally painful for one who owes much to Harvard, but - to the university's credit - it has completely acknowledged this shameful chapter in Harvard's illustrious history:

"As eugenics grew in popularity, it took hold at the highest levels of Harvard. A. Lawrence Lowell, who served as president from 1909 to 1933, was an active supporter. Lowell, who worked to impose a quota on Jewish students and to keep black students from living in the Yard, was particularly concerned about immigration—and he joined the eugenicists in calling for sharp limits. “The need for homogeneity in a democracy,” he insisted, justified laws “resisting the influx of great numbers of a greatly different race.” Lowell also supported eugenics research. When the Eugenics Record Office, the nation’s leading eugenics research and propaganda organization, asked for access to Harvard records to study the physical and intellectual attributes of alumni fathers and sons, he readily agreed. Lowell had a strong personal interest in eugenics research, his secretary noted in response to the request."

Keeping inferior human genes out of the United States became an obsession with Harvard geneticists. One prominent member of the Harvard science faculty, Professor Edward M. East, sounded the alarm about uncontrolled immigration in a best-selling book:

In his 1923 book, Mankind at the Crossroads, East’s pleas became more emphatic. The nation, he said, was being overrun by the feebleminded, who were reproducing more rapidly than the general population. “And we expect to restore the balance by expecting the latter to compete with them in the size of their families?” East wrote. “No! Eugenics is sorely needed; social progress without it is unthinkable….”

Hitler began writing Mein Kampf shortly after the publication of East's book.

It would have been bad enough if the Harvard professors had kept their junk science confined to Harvard Yard, but they were intent on infecting government institutions and the public at large with the eugenics gospel of genetic superiority:

"In 1894, a group of alumni met in Boston to found an organization that took a eugenic approach to what they considered the greatest threat to the nation: immigration. Prescott Farnsworth Hall, Charles Warren, and Robert DeCourcy Ward were young scions of old New England families, all from the class of 1889. They called their organization the Immigration Restriction League, but genetic thinking was so central to their mission that Hall proposed calling it the Eugenic Immigration League. Joseph Lee, A.B. 1883, A.M.-J.D. ’87, LL.D. ’26, scion of a wealthy Boston banking family and twice elected a Harvard Overseer, was a major funder, and William DeWitt Hyde A. B. 1879, S.T.D. ’86, another future Overseer and the president of Bowdoin College, served as a vice president. The membership rolls quickly filled with hundreds of people united in xenophobia, many of them Boston Brahmins and Harvard graduates.Their goal was to keep out groups they regarded as biologically undesirable. Immigration was “a race question, pure and simple,” Ward said. “It is fundamentally a question as to…what races shall dominate in the country.” League members made no secret of whom they meant: Jews, Italians, Asians, and anyone else who did not share their northern European lineage."

America's attempts to keep "inferior genes" from its shores through restrictions on immigration found a great admirer in Adolf Hitler, who advocated similar controls for Germany.

"Mein Kampf also displayed a familiarity with the recently passed US National Origins Act, which called for eugenic quotas. "There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but [the US], in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalisation, it professes in slow beginnings a view that is peculiar to the People's State."Hitler proudly told his comrades how closely he followed American eugenic legislation. "Now that we know the laws of heredity," he told a fellow Nazi, "it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world. I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."

Harvard's infatuation with the "science" of eugenics was eventually played out by the 1930's and the university - and America - reversed course and rejected the junk science. But the damage was done. And even today we see the remnants of eugenics in the rhetoric of Donald Trump, who calls immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere "rapists, murderers, drug dealers and gang members." Or in Thilo Sarrazin's book Deutschland schafft sich ab, - an anti-immigrant screed that draws heavily on the work of Charles Murray (Harvard University, Class of 1965).